Developed and instructed by Brian Dang and Jimmy Fay, both second-year graduate students in Brown’s MFA in Playwriting program, the course invites students to reimagine the creative process by using found materials — from abandoned thrift store finds and museum artifacts to memories and overheard dialogue. 

“Any object has the power to tell a story, and finding the poetry in it is about observing it and imagining what worlds are in it,” said Dang, who first co-taught the class with Fay last summer. 

Each day during the two-week course, students read and discuss a piece of literature before diving into dynamic writing exercises, structured peer workshops and a rigorous feedback process in which students can share and refine their work. But one of the most distinctive elements of the class are “artist dates,” or field trips designed to inspire observation and immersion. 

“Getting taken places, like physically going and immersing oneself in a space, is really valuable,” Fay said. “It’s especially important at this age to be put in the face of beauty — to show how valuable that is in a writing practice.”

Which is how Caleia Worthen, a rising high school junior from Phoenix, found herself on the third floor of Brown’s John Hay Library — and in the RISD Museum, at India Point Park, and a few secondhand and antique shops scattered across Providence. In addition to other class exercises, like drawing a map of her childhood home from memory, creating erasure poetry, or engaging in verbatim theater with her peers, the artist dates struck a chord with the 15-year-old, who said the course helped her better understand writing as a tangible, iterative process.

“It really helped me break down the steps and understand that all writing comes from something, even if it’s a small, strange object in a thrift store,” Worthen said.

More than anything, Worthen’s experience in Secondhand Writing, and Pre-College as a whole, has helped her imagine a future in higher education.

“I’m always going to remember this,” she said. “It’s helped me stop idealizing college and just understand it instead. I can picture myself walking on a campus, because now I’ve done it.”

That sentiment was echoed by Worthen’s classmate Vienna Meyer, a rising high school senior from Shutesbury, Massachusetts. With a longstanding interest in archival research and two grandparents who were history professors, Meyer was drawn to the “antique” elements of the course. As she spent more time reading mentor texts and workshopping with her peers, she said that  any expectations she had of the course were quickly exceeded. 

“I’ll take a lot of techniques from this class into my writing in the future,” Meyer said. “But I think my absolute favorite part about being in a college course is that everyone actually wants to be there. That makes discussions more engaging. People care about the topics, and everyone just wants to learn.”

The curiosity and enthusiasm of the Pre-College students is motivating, Dang and Fay said, and the experience of teaching Secondhand Writing for the second time has also advanced their own scholarship as graduate students at Brown. 

“The workshop environment is so instructive for me as a writer,” Fay said. “Sometimes, I hear pieces in workshop from these teenagers, and I feel like they are writing from my past, or even from my future. They’ve never read my work, but still my writing has a relationship to all the writing in the room.”

Many facets of the course’s structure are inspired by techniques and prompts drawn from their own experiences with colleagues and instructors in Brown’s MFA playwriting program — representing a “perfect arc” of teaching and learning, Dang said. 

“The way our students communicate their curiosity is invigorating,” Dang said. “This class serves as a way of reminding us how important it is to stay connected to each other, to keep reading, and to keep encountering the world around us with curiosity, because it’s the only way we can fill our wells.”